You can read more about TweakTown's Storage Product Testing Workstation and the procedures followed to test products in this article.

As mentioned previously, our Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB drive arrived with firmware 002. All of the drives shipping from Crucial are leaving the factory with the latest firmware that fixes TRIM and a few other issues that are minor. At the time of writing FW 002 is still not available to the public after being removed from Crucial's website. Sometime in the near future this firmware will be made available again.

There are a few forums that have links to user saved firmware, but honestly, just hang tight and wait for Crucial to get the new update software ready. I managed to put one of my drives in a hardware state that was not usable and considering that I do this for a living and have updated more than a few drives in my day, there is a good chance you will do the same. That said, hundreds of people have updated their firmware with success, but some of the enthusiast motherboards, mainly the X58A-UD7 that I use, has some issues even when following the instructions to the letter. I will talk more about firmware in the conclusion and in an upcoming State of Solid State article.

Today we will be testing the Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB SSD in both SATA 6G on the GIGABYTE X58A-UD7's Marvell SATA 6G controller and the Intel ICH SATA 3G controller. For comparison we have several Indilinx Barefoot and SandForce SF-1200 controlled drives in our performance charts and even a few JMicron products. Please stick around after the benchmark section and read the conclusion where we will break down this highly contested 100 / 128GB capacity market where value as well as performance dictate where your buying Dollar is spent.

ATTO Baseline Performance

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.34

ATTO is used by many disk manufacturers to determine the read and write speeds that will be presented to customers.

In ATTO I used the SATA 6G test since we are looking for the maximum performance offered to us by the drive. Here we see that the SATA 6G interface allows the RealSSD C300 to read data around 100MB/s faster than the real world limits found on SATA 3G. If I was allowed to inject a couple of curse words in here, I would, and it would read something like Freaking Butt that is fast!

We already knew that the 128GB model of the C300 had a slower write speed than the 256GB drive and here we see the most we will be able to pull out of the 128GB model. We were not able to break 150MB/s, but we did manage to test the drive faster than Crucial's rated 140 MB/s speed.

As my mouth gets washed out with soap, let's move on and look at some synthetic numbers and then get right to the heart of the matter with some real world usage benchmarks.

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